Strange things

Welcome to the online home of author Michael Wehunt. Here you’ll find my latest news, announcements, and musings. My fiction tends to the darker end of the spectrum, but the only true constant is a love of the literary, words strung in a line, be it the beauty of regular old life or old things that shouldn’t be scratching at the inside of the closet door. These differences really aren’t that different.

What, exactly, do I write? Some weird stuff, man, but for me it runs deeper than a word. My first, boyhood love was Stephen King, but I fell hard early on for poetry and the more wordcrafty of literary writers. I stepped away from horror before I explored it. I discovered Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner, Joyce Carol Oates, James Joyce, Toni Morrison…all the usual and rightful suspects. Dylan Thomas, Plath, Rimbaud, and Rilke wrung me out. Then over the years I found David Mitchell, Donna Tartt, Cormac McCarthy, Denis Johnson…more usual and rightful suspects. But along the way I had great fun reading nearly every Agatha Christie novel, the random crime thriller, and Tolkien. What I didn’t actively realize at the time was that most of my reading choices still carried a strong current of darkness, sadness, the darkest potential of the human soul along with the most graceful. People always wonder what is out there, and they often feel very small. Cosmic horror is universal.

Again: What, exactly, do I write? Even though I did not springboard from King to an excavation of Jackson, Machen, Blackwood, Leiber, Lovecraft, and the weird fiction vanguard, I am more and more happy that I came to them a little later in life. It has been a joy playing catchup, working my way backward from Laird Barron to “The Great God Pan.” There are great and wonderful stirrings in the weird, a global and diverse community starting to draw together in celebration of the uncannily gorgeous and gorgeously uncanny. Writers of all screeds and creeds and ancestries. I am proud to be a part of it, and I hope to contribute my two cents to its history before I’m done.

So to answer: strange things. But also graceful things, when I can. At their best they are the same things. If “literary weird fiction” and “weird literary fiction” can simultaneously be choices, then I mark an X next to both. Enjoy.